by Sean Platt
Clint watched Rigo fight for a long time — longer than he should have, because he was only encouraging the kid — and then finally called out to end the melee. The fighters stopped and looked over, panting for breath. In the middle stood 14-year-old Rigo, his bare chest heaving, his grin so wide that it seemed to touch his ears.
“Okay,” Clint said. “I will admit that you can fight. But how did you learn?” He’d never seen a style of fighting like Rigo’s. Gunslingers fired guns, and the deadliest fighters Clint had ever known did the same. The idea of inflicting so much damage only using one’s body was inconceivable. Clint found himself wondering how the kid would do in a gunfight. Would he be easily felled, rendering his fancy feet and hands useless? Or would he adapt and find a way to survive… or even win?
“I doubt you will believe this,” Rigo said, “but it came from a dream.”
“You learned all of this from a dream?” Clint said, gape-mouthed. “You’re right. I don’t believe it.”
“Some of us, as we sleep, see visions that we believe come either from behind the wall of The Realm, or directly from the magic. In my mind I see a man, clad in black and often shirtless, who can do these incredible things and battle multiple attackers. And as I watched those dreams night after night, my body learned to do what he did.”
“That’s your mind,” said Clint, shaking his head. His own hands hadn’t learned quickness because he thought on quickness.
“The possession of anything starts in the mind,” Rigo said. “As you think, so shall you become.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just that in this case, seeing it in my head was a start to what became a bodily habit.” Then the boy’s steely gaze faded, and he stopped being the deadly phantom from his dreams. He became Rigo again. His shoulders slumped, almost bashful, but his smile stayed fixed. A deep, deadly confidence could still be seen swelling from deep down inside him — like a man inside of a man.
“Okay,” said the gunslinger. “If you can train the others to do what you can, you may fight with us when El Feo comes. And I daresay you’ll make for a formidable weapon.”
Rigo smiled. “Gracias, amigo!”
“So that’s how many? There’s you, me, Edward, Stone, Pompi, and Buckaroo… as long as there are no birds.”
Rigo ticked them off on his fingers as Clint counted. When he finished, the kid was silently holding up an open right hand a thumb on the left: Six.
“It’s not enough,” said Clint.
“We will train the others before the harvest is finished, señor,” said the boy. “They will fight too, once they know how.”
They were standing in that tableau — the gunslinger in front of the boy, with happy and exhausted men behind them, picking up debris from the sunny street — when a man wearing twin bandoliers rounded the corner on a white horse.
Behind him rode row after row of ornately masked men.
CHAPTER SIX:
EL FEO
The man not wearing a mask (but wearing a pocked face, a small mustache, and a wide hat) approached, then paused without bothering to dismount. The other men, all masked and riding horses of their own, spread around the practice area until a semicircle had formed facing Clint, Rigo, and the villagers. Then the villagers slowly backed away, leaving only the gunslinger and the boy to face the bandit.
“I guess you’ve got more visitors,” said Clint, looking at El Feo and his Gross of Gringos.
The Gringos’ masks were all painted and decorated to look like colorful skulls. The masks themselves were varied, but the men behind them looked as if they’d been cut from a common mold. They all seemed to be the same height, weight, and build. They all held their reins in exactly the same way. The small motions each made with their heads and bodies, Clint thought, were identical from man to man. And there were many, many men.
“So when you said ‘Gross of Gringos’,” a deep voice to Clint’s left said to Rigo, “you meant it literally.”
Clint turned to the voice and found himself staring at Edward’s big white head and horn.
“Yar,” said Rigo. “A gross. One hundred and forty four men, señor. I thought you understood.”
“By ‘gross,’ I figured you meant they didn’t bathe,” said Edward. His nostrils flared. “Which they don’t seem to,” he added.
“So Baracho Gulch has found itself some guardians!” El Feo announced with a smile from atop his horse, looking down at Clint and Edward. “That is nice.”
“We haven’t finished the harvest,” Rigo told the bandit.
“Oh, I know that. But I sent a few advance men, and they told me that your harvest slowed when some strangers came to visit. I decided to come see these visitors for myself. And look what I find! A Realm marshal true and his trusty sidekick! But señor,” he said, lowering his chin toward Clint, “you’ve nar enough bullets in your guns to handle a tenth of us.”
“I have more bullets,” said Clint, his hand hovering above his belt. Beside him, Edward’s horn pulsed red, then blue, then green.
“Oh, sí, sí. And your big horse, he can shoot fireballs at us! But let me ask you, amigo: Who will protect the villagers while you are busy fighting?”
Clint looked around the semicircle and estimated that only half of El Feo’s men were present in the square. The others might be in other parts of the village with hostages, or in the dry fields with lit torches. Or mayhap in the hills, with rifles aimed.
“Fourteen bullets is less than a tenth of what would be needed to shoot one hundred and forty-five men,” Edward said, repeating El Feo. He thought for a moment. “That’s right. I didn’t think bandits got learnin.’ ” He looked up at the bandit. “Hey, chief: What’s the capital of Yuma Province?”
“Seattle.”
Edward frowned, then turned to Clint. “He’s right. Don’t be fooled by his odor.”
There was the creak of a door, and Sly Stone sauntered out of the mud-brick saloon, his guns drawn and aimed at the bandit’s head. Other than the presence of two giant magical shotguns in his hands, Sly looked like he could be out for a stroll. He walked to Clint’s side and stood there, looking around with a smile on his face. Several of the Gringos drew their firearms in answer, but El Feo didn’t draw. He chuckled instead.
“Three is not enough to fight so many of us, no matter who those three are,” he said.
“Four,” said Rigo.
El Feo laughed hard enough to send a hand to his belly. Once calm he said, “Oh! The Montoya family has assured for itself matching graves instead of supper! Good for the village, I suppose. More supper for the rest of them.”
A clanking noise came from beyond the town fountain. A few of the Gringos turned, the skulls’ teeth painted on their masks seeming to grimace. Then a drawling, proper-sounding voice said, “Five, sirs,” and Clint looked over to see Buckaroo stepping into the open, his chest parted and his canon out.
The smile stayed on El Feo’s unshaven face, but something subtle shifted in his expression. Clint attempted to put himself in the man’s shoes, to see the village’s new arrivals as El Feo must be seeing them. There were many more Gringos than fighters, but there was also so much about the hired guns that would be unknown. Would bullets harm the thinking machine? What could the machine’s large weapon do? What might the pulsing capsules in the orange-haired man’s shotguns be? How much damage could the unicorn inflict? Clint had no idea how much a Sands bandit would know about unicorns, but the presence of one in the village had to be daunting. As Clint watched the man on the horse, he seemed to be weighing his odds. He might be estimating his ability to fight shields, folding, and a unicorn’s devastating assault spells.
Still, he held his ground, and held his pride.
“I see we are surrounded!” he said with a sarcastic laugh, looking around and waving his arms. “But alas… even five, I think, is not enough.”
Clint looked around too, but not for theatric value. He was calculating positions, odds, and losses. He
’d been watching the body language of the men in the ornate masks, and unless they held a secret weapon he couldn’t fathom, he felt he could read them perfectly. These men had come on this errand year after dusty year, and each year, the village had offered the resistance of a sponge. Even if a new decree from a dark power had made them desperate, they would still be complacent. That complacency would make them slow.
Clint estimated he could empty his guns and take out fourteen of the masked men before they fired a single reasonably aimed shot. Edward could take scores easily, and protect their group — all but Buckaroo, who was too far away but who wouldn’t need protection from commoner’s bullets anyway. If anyone mortal took fire, Edward would be able to heal them once there was a lull. Stone wouldn’t need to reload and could fire scattered rounds that, at close range, would likely take two of the gross at once. Buckaroo’s canon could do significant damage, and Rigo could handle any men who lost their firearms — not much, but it was something.
Clint was reasonably confident they could take out the bandits he saw without casualties to their own. But the problem was the bandits he couldn’t see. Those men might do anything — burn, pillage, kill innocents… anything.
Seeming to read Clint’s mind, Edward whispered to Clint, low enough that nobody else would hear: “Stand down. He wants the crops. Let him leave with them, thinking he’s won. We can catch up with them later.”
Clint whispered back, “We can beat them.”
“Of course we can. But we need to know more, seeing as these men are in league with…”
“… the Darkness,” Clint finished.
“Mayhap,” said Edward. “But I don’t sense Darkness in these men as I have in others. Before you interrupted me, I was going to say Kold.”
El Feo was watching them, waiting to see what came next. He didn’t seem at all worried.
“Kold?” Clint hissed.
“You’re slow,” whispered Sly Stone, butting in. “Your man Kold is the Meadowlands land baron.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Clint said.
But before Stone could answer, a huge booming noise came from behind the bandits and Pompi Bobo tromped onto the scene with his enormous hammer in his hands. His kinky giant’s hair stuck out at odd angles. He yawned, appearing mildly bothered to be awoken but otherwise ready for work.
“Pompi makes six,” the giant said, his footfalls causing the mud buildings to shake and rain dust. Clint, who knew that Pompi could walk like a feather when he wanted, figured that this was for effect.
Several of the horses — including El Feo’s — started to stutter backward, spooked. The bandit held the horse, his hand falling to his sidearm. He didn’t draw. He watched Clint, refusing to give him the satisfaction of looking over at Pompi.
“So, Baracho has found its spine,” said El Feo. “But we are one hundred and forty five, and you cannot watch us all!”
Behind him bandits rattled weapons in the air.
“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory,” said Rigo, a serious look on his young face.
“Ring the bell to summon us when the harvest is finished, and have our share ready,” the bandit replied. “Do that, and you may live to see another year. Don’t, and we shall all see what happens.”
Then, with a final menacing glance around the square to remind everyone who was boss, he circled his hand in the air and the masked men turned their mounts around, leaving the way they’d come.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
UNWINNABLE
“We cannot win this fight,” said Edward.
“Make up your mind,” said Clint.
The gunslinger sat beside Mai’s bed in her open-ended room after the sun had set, brushing her hair from her face. Her body seemed greatly improved, but she’d still not regained consciousness. Her skin had lost its papery appearance and was now mostly smooth. Her flesh had filled out, replenished with some of the fat back where it was supposed to be. Beneath that, her muscles seemed to be returning, hardening even beyond the lithe strong presence she’d had before. Her beauty was slowly resurfacing. Her shoulder blades no longer protruded. Most of this had happened in the past half-day. It was as if the Rio Verde’s magic was accelerating in Mai — increasing not just her healing, but also her rate of healing. Whenever Clint went to her bedside, he thought of Edward’s metaphor of the phoenix bird, and had frightening visions of Mai erupting in magical fire.
“I was wrong,” Edward told him. He’d pulled back the heavy drapery that formed the room’s fourth wall and was sipping from a bowl of tequil he’d magicked from the saloon. “There are too many men to watch and follow all of them. We can fight, yar. What we can’t do is keep them from causing the village irreparable damage while we fight.”
One of the villagers had given Clint a heavy alloy coin. The gunslinger tossed it up and down, up and down, snatching it from the air to practice his oversized marshal’s hands. “This was your idea!” he snapped.
“Yar, and there were three reasons for that. The first was that we were coming here anyway to sip from the river. That, we’ve done. The second was to stop a bandit who was being controlled by the Darkness. But I sensed no Darkness in El Feo or his men.”
“He could still be working for Kold, like Independence Lee,” said Clint.
“Yar, he could. But we could also just be fools wasting time while Kold increases what is already nearly six months’ worth of lead on us. And as far as saving time by crossing the Rio instead of going around? Well, I’ve looked at the crossing more closely since we’ve been here. We wouldn’t actually be crossing the dangerous part, where the Verde dives underground. We’d be crossing a tributary that feeds into the river’s main body. That’s barely magical water. It’s not rapid, just deep. I might be able to swim it.”
“Might.”
“Honestly,” the unicorn said, “I’d prefer to take the boat Rigo mentioned.”
“Which he said he’d let us use if we could help this village.”
Edward took a sip of his tequil. “We could take it without his permission.”
Clint glared at Edward, the coin momentarily halting in his hands. “You’d do that? You really are terrible.”
“Fine. But I’m not swimming with you on my back. Can you swim?”
The gunslinger, who’d spent his life in the desert, stared at Edward.
“Mayhap I could float you. Or magick a boat, for that matter.” He rolled his eyes, shocked that they hadn’t figured this out earlier. “There it is. We can magick a boat and cross at our leisure. Tonight, if we want to.”
But Clint, as much as he’d wanted to pass on this errand and as much as he’d refused to bond with the locals, shook his head. He looked away and resumed his tossing, flipping the coin high in the air. He caught it between two fingers, balanced it on his thumb, and rolled it across his knuckles.
“Coward.”
“It’s not cowardice. It’s sense. You want to help this village? Then don’t start a fight you can’t finish, that won’t make things worse for them for years to come. All it would take for this to go sour would be for a single bandit to set a torch to any of these thatched roofs once they felt that we were winning. They could destroy the crops. Capture their women and children. Kill villagers. We can protect ourselves, but what about them?”
Clint was about to retort, but the same concerns had been in his mind for hours. It wasn’t simply a matter of fighting. If their troop met El Feo’s in a canyon with no one around, Clint would be willing to battle until everyone on one side lay dead. His own side would probably be victorious, but even if they weren’t and were killt, it wouldn’t mean the end of the world. The gunslinger wasn’t afraid to die, or to lose. What bothered him about this fight was that only one side would play fair. There were too many unscrupulous shortcuts in a fight like the one they were facing.
“So what are you saying?” he asked the unicorn. “Cut and run? Let El Feo keep brutalizing and pillaging the village?”
&n
bsp; “We have a larger errand in Elf Meadows.”
“Allow the forces we’re after in the Meadows to have their fill in Baracho Gulch? Strengthen Kold by letting him weaken this village?”
“Gunslinger,” said Edward. “You have known me for longer than any man. I am not one to run or surrender. But this is a fight we cannot win. Six fighters are not enough.”
Clint sighed. He tossed the coin, but it never landed. Instead, it made a sharp angle in the air and shot like a bullet toward Mai, who raised a hand to catch it. The coin struck her palm with a sound like snapping leather.
“Seven,” she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
THE AWAKENING
There was no slow and gradual improvement in Mai’s recovery upon waking. It happened all at once. It was as if her body and mind had been organizing themselves as she slept, healing her entirely before returning her to consciousness, like a mad genius completing his machine backstage before dropping the curtain. Within minutes after she caught Clint’s coin — or, more accurately, after she called Clint’s coin to her hand from out of the air — the last of the pallor fled her skin. Her wrinkles vanished. There was no glaze in her expression, or softness in her muscles.
Her body, as she rose, was a work of art. She was beautiful and soft where she was supposed to be, but hard everywhere else. She immediately seemed to be far faster and stronger than she’d ever been since Clint had known her — faster and stronger, it seemed, than Clint himself. She literally leapt up from the bed. When Clint told her that she was weak and should settle, Mai gave him a sly look and then ran through the door at a sprint. The gunslinger wasn’t fast enough to follow, but Edward pursued her into the hills, up toward a rocky cliff where his heavy, clumsy hooves finally couldn’t follow, and he lost her. Mai returned ten minutes later, barely winded and still wearing nightclothes, her expression flushed with euphoria.